Resisting State Violence: Occupy PHX Tie Dye March

On Saturday, December 10, Occupy Phoenix recognized International Human Rights Day by protesting state violence and police brutality. I was busy down at the Sandra Day O'Connor federal courthouse (4th Ave  and  W. Washington) for most of the march, making another memorial to dead prisoners....

I missed the most powerful part of the action down at the PHX Police Station, where numerous people gave first-hand testimony of how state and police violence have affected them. We're still waiting for Dennis Gilman's footage, but  some video of OP member statements on police brutality can be found here. 

I joined OP as they came back down W. Washington, taking the street on their way into the Tamale Festival...

 "Whose Streets?!"

W. Washington at 4th Ave, PHOENIX

International Human Rights Day 

December 10, 2011

What follows is the account of the Tie Dye March of one of the original Hance Park arrestees from her Spacebook post (thanks for this, Janet):

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The Tie Dye March

by Janet Higgins on Sunday, 11 December 2011 at 12:48

In honor of International Human Rights Day and to protest Police Brutality, Occupy Phoenix had a Tie Dye March, with tie dye banners stenciled with the faces of human rights leaders such as Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez, Emma Goldman, Mother Teresa, etc. The banners really were beautiful and everyone got a tie dyed t-shirt or a tie dyed  bandana. Bandanas are now essential clothing when protesting in America. When I got down to Cesar Chavez Memorial Plaza in the morning, they were setting up for a festival on Washington St. This weekend is the Tamale Festival, which explains why Occupy Phoenix was raided by the Phoenix Police Department two nights in a row without warning and why people were arrested. They were trying to shut us down before hundreds of people showed up for the Tamale Festival. Some of those people might have seen all the canopies set up right next to them and come over to see what was going on.

Not many people were there when I arrived a little before 10:00, but as time went on, more and more people came. We had close to a hundred people. Too bad we didn’t have the hundreds and hundreds of people who had turned out for the first day. But that’s ok, it was the perfect amount.

When we started our March the police officers told us we had to stay on the sidewalk. Our banners were larger than the sidewalk, so we chanted “Whose streets? Our streets.“ We marched on half the street and left the other half open for traffic. We headed towards the Federal Courthouse and took some group pictures, under the words “The First Duty of Society is Justice.“ Then we headed for Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s 4th Avenue Jail. A lot of us have been in that jail, so we know how people are treated there. Some great chants of “Hey Hey Ho Ho Sheriff Joe Has Got To Go.” Always refreshing to make that powerful statement. We passed by the Fox News Building on our way to visit the Phoenix Police Department. We had some choice words for Fox News, despite the fact that no one was home. But, hey, is anyone ever at home at Fox News?

The most powerful segment of the March took place in front of the Phoenix Police Department. It was there that people stood up and told their stories of police brutality. One by one, people used the human microphone or the bullhorn to tell their stories. Many of these stories went back to their childhood. It was extremely painful to hear these stories. My heart broke over and over. I can’t recount the stories, because they were so personal and so painful that just thinking about them brings tears to my eyes. They are on video and their own words are much more powerful than mine. I can only hope that being able to tell these stories to the members of Occupy Phoenix, to people who are caring and compassionate, was a cathartic moment. One woman said, “I’ve only told this story to my boyfriend.”

I wonder what the handful of police officers were thinking as these stories were told. The police helicopter circled overhead for a few minutes. The police had a “hands off” approach, even though there was a paddy wagon waiting, just in case. I guess raiding the encampment two nights in a row had given them their fix.

From the Phoenix Police Department, we headed for the Tamale Festival. We marched right down the center of that festival, chanting “Hey Hey Ho Ho Sheriff Joe Has Got To Go.” We got some thumbs ups, we got some hand slaps, we got a lot of stunned people wondering what was going on. We made an impact. We were noticed. I felt really proud carrying a banner through the Tamale Festival.

The first time I marched I was 17. I marched against the War in Vietnam. If you have never marched in your life, now is the time to do it. This country needs you. This country needs all of us. We must all wrap ourselves around this country and push her into the 21st Century. All hands on deck now. We need you. This is the time and this is the moment. This is the most important moment of our lives. So lace up your shoes, find a march near you, and take your power back.

We are unstoppable. Another world is possible.

Janet Higgins
12/10/11

Truth in Sentencing and Human Rights.

Upcoming Events

December 10: International Human Rights Day.

December 15: 5th Special Legislative Session to screw the poor and working classes even further.
December 17: International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers (Tucson Memorial).

December 18: Sex Workers Outreach Project Protest at the AZ DOC in Phoenix.

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(This is a cross-post from AZ Prison Watch, which is the site I'll use for posting further prisoner death notices from the ADC. I just wanted to let folks over here know what was  up.)

I appear to have stopped posting the inmate death notices in August sometime. It wasn't a conscious decison;  think it was just particularly heartbreaking, and I couldn't seem to keep up with them. But people often come back here again and again searching for links about their loved ones, sometimes posting final messages or explanations so that others might understand what happened to them, and know that they weren't a bad person just because they died in prison. 

I think we should be here for them, so even if it makes us all a little uncomfortable, so I'm going to start putting these folks back up on AZ Prison Watch when they die. We need to know what's killing them, and while they don't give us many clues in the press releases, we do get a little closer to the human suffering part of their experience. 

I always wonder how differently a judge might have sentenced someone if he or she knew that it could be the last few years of their life because prison is harder to survive when you're ill or your immune system is compromised...Maybe judges should have to include statistical probabilities with each sentence that they hand out which informs defendants of their likelihood of being raped in prison, contracting a deadly infectious disease, dying of an otherwise treatable cancer for a delay in diagnosis or inadequate medical intervention, or being otherwise terribly compromised or violated. That would be real "truth-in-sentencing".

Those odds could all,be calculated out - they probably already have been by risk management experts who determine whether or not it's cheaper to let someone get injured and try suing (fat chance if you're a prisoner suin for rights), to settle a case or fight it in court, or to fix the potential hazard in the first place (why bother if prisoners can't sue?). Having to speak aloud the atrocities they must know occur in American prisons may at least make judges think twice about the sentences they were handing out, and what they really expect to accomplish by incarcerating addicted survivors of trauma, for example, with those who would be their perpetrators. What kind of lesson does that teach to whom? 

Even if the judges don't learn from such disclosure of what prison really does to people, the public would. Most of us would not condemn a mentally ill teenager to being repeatedly raped or to endure a long slow death by Hepatitis C for pulling a pen knife out when he thought someone was trying to kill him during a manic episode. Most of us would probably wonder why he was in prison instead of  a psychiatric hospital. 

Most everyone in court when he was sentenced wondered that too. 

Some of us just don't have lives that seem worth saving, I think, or we are viewed as being so helpless and pathetic that we need to be protected from ourselves by being put in prison for awhile, which too many Americans actually think is a "safe" place for people like Marcia Powell (and myself, for that matter), someplace where we would get presumably good dental and health care, be fed three times a day, and been seen by mental health staff... I think that's mostly just fantasy in America, though. Many prisoners only get fed twice a day, small portions of empty calories full of sugars and cholesterol  - for which they may even have to pay from their fifteen-cents-an-hour job.

Social Workers who think they are doing their clients a "favor" by conspiring with courts and cops to help them "hit bottom" via the brutal path through jail or prison may just be setting them up to crash through their bottom and die.  If you're going to mess with people's lives like that, then remember  first, to do no harm.

Even those of you with the best intentions impose your own version of order on us as we try to navigate an increasingly insane world with minimal resources for survival, while you ignore our resistance and cause for protest, and blame us for "non-compliance" if we reject the promise your prescribed pharmaceutical solutions offer to make us nauseaus, give us uncontrollable tremors, numb us to our loved one's smile, touch, or words  of comfort, or silence us in a drugged stupor for months or years.  

We really don't need those kinds of favors, no matter how many recovering addicts swear by "tough love" saving their lives - it was the love part, not so much the tough, that saved most of the hardest cases I knew. For every one who was saved by 12-Step ways, many more were lost along the same road to recovery; their families left in the wake of suicides and drunk driving accidents interrogating themselves about whether or not they were tough enough, too tough, or loving enough.

If every social worker, lawyer, judge and cop had to do a stint as a prisoner or involuntary psychiatric patient, there'd be a lot more sensitivity coming from those directions, and probably more effective solutions to engage someone in treatment would be tried - coercion should be the absolute last resort to protect life and limb.

So, we're going to be looking at you, too, my friends on the bench - if you're up for re-election this year, we'll be taking notes in your courtroom and gathering data on your sentencing practices, finding out who among you has accepted the responsibility of weighing multiple and competing views of justice, tuning out political pressures, and come up with creative and meaningful responses to human crises more in the vein of restorative than retributive justice - especially those of you in juvenile justice. 

Prosecutors, be on notice too. And any court-appointed attorneys that give their indigent clients the short shrift - we'll catch you. And you well-meaning social workers. CourtWatch is coming to Phoenix soon. What you do will no longer be visible only by way of your own press releases - we'll have inside accounts of how you treat people, and just how some of these pleas are arrived at that result in so many people - including the innocent - giving up their rights to trial out of fear, just to put another notch in Thomas' belt of "convictions".  From what I hear, he's got an awful lot of innocent people tucked underneath that belt. The new Maricopa County Attorney, if they have any guts, will start opening innocence claims once Thomas is run out on a rail, if he doesn't take the responsibility to deal with them himself first. The latter would seem to be the more responsible and noble course of action.

Anyway, regardless of their crimes, convictions, or time, I think the folks dying in prison deserve to be at least noticed by us - we may be the only people to whom their passing matters - except perhaps their victim, if there was ever one other than themselves to begin with. So, with today being International Human Rights Day, I thought it was time to go back and catch up on the names of those who have died in state custody over the past few months. I'll be working on this one all day, I think.

I may take a lunch break to do something down at the AZ DOC - call me if anyone's interested in joining me - just want to make sure the prisoners know that they're being thought of today.

Human Rights Day Protest: Reeves Co. TX

This via Ken at Private Corrections Institute. It touches on one of the consequences of putting profit into the prison business. We should look at what we'll be doing here on International Human Rights Day, too.

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Grassroots Leadership Calls for Scrutiny of Pecos Prison 

 

 Posted by editor on Friday, December 04 @ 09:57:00 EST 

 

Friends:

For International Human Rights Day (Dec. 10), please join us in condemning the human rights abuses against immigrants incarcerated in the Reeves County Detention Center in Pecos, Texas. At least nine deaths in the last four years have been reported at Reeves and countless prisoners live daily with fear for their lives.

Reeves is run by the private prison company GEO Group for the Bureau of Prisons. Those held at Reeves are segregated based on their immigration status. Many, including several who have died, served 5 or 10 year sentences for immigration violations.

We're on lock down 21 hours a day. When you're sick they don't call you till a week or a month later. There's people that put in request for surgery over six months ago and they still haven't gotten it. - Reeves County Prisoner

Grassroots Leadership joins with prisoners' families, the ACLU of Texas, Southwest Worker's Union, and the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights to denounce the serious human rights abuses at the Reeves County Detention Center in Pecos, Texas.

Please join us in the coming weeks in a series of actions to stop these abuses.

We urge the Obama Administration and the Department of Justice to end the contract with the controversial GEO Group, investigate the abuses at Reeves, and ensure humane conditions for all inmates.

Bob Libal and Luissana Santibañez

Grassroots Leadership